Australia Day Weekend

Happy Australia Day, and also Happy Burns Night to my Scottish friends. Hope both events were filled with much fun and laughter and bbq/haggis. Nice to know that I am so behind the music that I have never heard the Muse song which came in at Number 1 on JJJ's Hottest 100 this year http://triplej.abc.net.au/hottest100/. Very surprised that Josh Pyke didn't rate higher as his album did so well in the charts for an Australian artist. He did, however get several entries (3 or 4?) in so well done. Sounds like Architecture in Helsinki have had a stellar year and seems like BritPop has made a small comeback in Australian radio with lots of Muse, Editors, Kasabian etc. Only 4 Aussie songs in the top ten this year, hoped for better!

I spent Australia Day with my homestay family, extended family and new friends. We bundled into the back of the ute and went to a waterfall about 10km outside of Kuraburi town (picture above). The water was so clear it was unbelievable and the surrounds so picturesque. Reclining myself in a nook of the gentle waterfall and having the cool water wash over me in the hot sun with the kids playing in the background was bliss. One of those "this is what I am travelling for" moments and a big smile on my face all day. I love the water (typical Pisces, eh?) Had a yummy picnic there (rice of course) before returning in the afternoon a bright shade of pink. My sunburn on my arms and legs is settling down now but I've had a few uncomfortable days...silly girl.

Sunday was my "Visa Exemption Run". Originally I was thinking I would have to fly to Singapore but turns out all I needed to do was travel 2 hours north to Ranong and cross the border to Myanmar (Burma), get my stamps, turn around and come back. Ranong is not much to write about and the boat ride to Myanmar was smelly and hot. Once in Myanmar the sense of calm that Thailand has was completely missing. At Port Victoria there is chaos, confusion, poverty, corruption and oppression all staring you in the face. Not a nice place to live and no photos to show you as if the authorities catch you taking photos they can confiscate your passport and camera. Most Westerners just go to get their Visa/Visa Exemption, buy cheap whisky, rum, cigarettes and viagra(!) and turn around and head back to peaceful Thailand. It was nice to not have to experience this alone, I had Emily to chat with (in picture), a volunteer working for Andaman Discoveries office for the next few months join me. She's only just arrived in Thailand last Thursday from London and plunged herself into daily life here really well. Great girl and has some amazing pictures I hope to copy, she always pulls out her camera whenever I cannot be bothered.

Kuraburi - Tung Nang Dam

As part of my 4 weeks volunteering in Thailand, I spent the first 5 days on a 'cultural immersion' programme. The first day I arrived in Kuraburi, I had spent the say travelling from the top to the bottom of the country.

At 6am I left my hostel in Chiang Mai to head to the airport for my Air Asia flight to Bangkok. All smooth sailing except for the fact they wanted to charge me for my excess 2kg baggage. No worries, snap off the front part of my pack to carry onboard and took it down to 15kg exactly. Gol! Once in Bangkok I hung around for about 4 hours at the airport waiting for my flight from BKK-Phuket. The time went quite quickly once I got some food, had a few texts from Mum and dealt with baggage again. Same airline for this flight, I added the front part of my pack back onto my checked in luggage and no mention about excess baggage. Excellent. Cut price flights are cheap here so I treat myself to flying instead of travelling on trains/buses for this journey.

Walking outside at Phuket Airport, it is POURING with rain. What a welcome! Tony, one of the young Thai workers for North Andaman Tsunami Relief (NATR) is waiting to pick me up and drive me to Kuraburi, my home in Thailand for the next little while. NATR is the NGO from which has grown Andaman Discoveries, the community based development organisation. Have a mosey on their websites http://www.andamandiscoveries.com/ and http://www.northandamantsunamirelief.com/unamirelief.com/.

For those that can't be bothered clicking, Andaman Discoveries' mission is to "support community-led development by acting as bridge to respectful visitors and volunteers through sponsorship of education, conservation and cultural empowerment". I am really impressed with this organisation and how it is run and would definately recommend it to anyone wanting to travel to Thailand for a bit more than beaches, sunburn and cheap sunglasses (or if you really want you can do both!)

Anyway, back to the story at hand.

So, Tony and I drove up Highway 4 to Kuraburi. It was a pleasant (straight!) drive of about 3 hours. I met Kelly, the Director of Andaman Discoveries. She is English but has been in Kuraburi for 2 years and Thailand for several more. Once the organisation is a little more set up, she will leave all the running to the local Thai team which are doing a great amount of work already. This change may be as soon as mid 2008.

Kelly and Tony took me to my homestay where I would stay for the night then take a long tail boat to Tung Nang Dam village the next day. Details of my homestay family and surroundings coming up in a later story. In short: delightful!

So good nights' sleep and a visit to the Watermelon Festival (another story on it's way) and off we go to Kuraburi pier to meet noy, my homestay host and local guide for the next 4 days in Tung Nang Dam. The boat ride was about half an hour and we travelled through mangroves to get there. Noy lives with her ageing (but still sprightly!) parents and looks after them. She has quite a few brothers and sisters, the youngest is also living in the home. The home is two level, is clean and cosy - as cosy as you can get with a cement floor and a few plastic chairs, no hot water or refrigerator. In fact, not much electricity at all, they have solar power so they save it up at night to watch a little bit of telly in the evenings. Pictures are of the living space downstairs and the hong nam (toilet!).

During the 4 days Kelly left and Tony arrived to stay and help with translation. We did plenty of activites where I learned so much and made me look forward to a cold shower twice a day...it is very hot on the island, shade or no shade!

On the first day we made pots of Noy's orchid conservation project. She has set up a nursey as people used to come to TND and steal the wild orchids to plant in their gardens. She plants cuttings from orchids, focusing on rarer varieties and when they are grown a little more and ready, she replants them in the jungle on the island. These pots we made from wood and bamboo and I am frustratingly bad at hammering nails into these materials! The nails we used were covered in black sticky stuff, they had been dropped in the sea water so to stop them from being unusable they soaked them in petrol. It saved the nails, but they were very unhappy to use the petrol as it is very expensive. Anywhere else we would just have thrown the nails out and bought new ones, hey...

Another day we made a traditional Thai dessert out of coconut. We shredded the coconut by hand (not as easy as it sounds!) then made milk from the shreds. The milk was poured into hot moulds and fried. Very sweet, not so tasty in my opinion but good experience!

The jungle hike was my favourite part of this trip. Hard but not too hard, stunning views and well worth reaching the top. So nice to see the wild orchids also, as well as various wildlife (snakes!). I am debating about whether to include my photo here as I was looking like a hot, sweaty Farang (westerner) - UGLY! After that we walked to the beach.

One of the days I was supposed to help build the community centre on the island but this didn't go to plan as that day they were building the roof. Instead, I watched them build whilst breaking countless Occ Health and Safety rules. Not wearing shoes on site, or whilst operating a chainsaw, almost falling off the roof from trying to pick up a lit cigarette (with their feet!) and children running about the site without a care in the world about the various offcuts and general construction materials lying about the playspace.

I made a mobile/windchime with coconut shells, sounds great in theory but bloody hard work and boring when drilling the holes without a drill! I hate being from the instant gratification generation. I made this for Jen as I was going to buy a windchime but I'm not sure if i'll get it through Aussie customs. I'll try!

One of the main sources of income in the village is natural rubber and I saw how it is extracted from the tree and made into sheets to sell. It is extremely had work, very low pay and as such a lot of Thai won't do it, so Burmese families come over the border for work. Same goes for the work on fishing boats.

Finally on one of the days we took the boat and went fishing for the day and visited a little island about 90 minutes away. I really don't enjoy fishing! We caught some squid as well and it's just so mucky with the black ink squirts and all. My only princess moment :)

Spent the day on this "deserted island" (by my standards ie. there was no one but us there and no buildings). We had lunch (cooked on board!) with rice and the fish we had caught that day. tony also made a fire to BBQ the squid on the island.

The food situation was amazing, every day we would make several different Thai dishes to share with lots of rice. Being an island there was a lot of fish to eat which I struggled with a little. Getting used to the spice now though.

It is hard to write just the bare bones of my experience but I wish I could share so much more with you. What I have seen, the smells, the weather, the mosquitoes(!) All pretty amazing. Living with a Thai family and doing normal things for them was completely new for me. Like rounding up the goats and feeding the baby ones in the evenings and waking up to rice soup for brekky. This is Noy and I in the picture as I was leaving the island. Great fun, great smile.

Lots of stories, jumble jumble.

So many stories for you I have not been writing down.

In chronological order I have:-

-BKK craziness in Bangkok

-Been to the Couch Surfing Collective in Pai, Thailand.

-Talked with a monk in Chiang Mai

-Travelled to Kuraburi on the Andaman Coast. Met my homestay family who I will stay with for a month.

-Been to a Watermelon Festival

-Stayed 4 days in an island village off the coast of Kuraburi

-Started my teaching at Kuraburi Pittayakorn (High School)

It is here where I am until mid February volunteering teaching English. It is amazing, surreal, crazy fun. I am treated like a bit of a celeb as they don't see Farang (foreigners) here in the town very often. Like I said, crazy.

Slowly I am getting together my thoughts and experiences to tell you. They will be out of order so when you read them as I update, story number one is on it's way next!

Thailand

It's been awhile blog!

So New Year's went grand, big party and silliness and I got on my 12.30pm 5 pound train to London from Edinburgh. Much fun especially having Ezara (pictured) visiting from Dublin to stay with us as well - the flat was full. Some tears from Briony and I at the train station, can't believe I won't see her in a little/long while (who knows?) after such an epic 2007 with her by my side for much of.

My flying visit to London went so smoothly, would have loved more time to catch up with people before I went but alas. Like I mentioned in my last post, I stayed with Claire, a lovely friend of mine who would probably be in Australia right now, visiting for the first time...lucky her! It was a great base to get all my last minute messages done and I was able to mosey to Heathrow very easily from there on the tube in the evening. Still can't believe I am on my way home and that I won't be hopping back to London any time soon. Flight went well and had a fantastic hostel in Bangkok, met some people and saw some sights...and had never yearned for fresh air more in my life. Would have liked to have spent more time in BKK but Pai beckoned 3 nights after my arrival in SE Asia.

Pai is a little town in the mountains in Northern Thailand. Quite an artistic community and it is so nice to have lots of music and art all around all the time. I don't have much internet time so I will post a little more about it another day but to cut it short I've been having a great time with beautifully hot days but freezing my bum off at night - it's the cold season here and the temperature DROPS after 8pm. I had a flight to Chang Mai from BKK then caught a rickshaw/"bus" (pictured, and PS the doors didn't shut for most of the ride, safety third in Thailand!) on the 4 hour drive to Pai...with a journey that encounters over 760 curves in the road. I had dosed up on travel sickness medication and unfortunately missed what I am sure was an amusing journey as I was knocked out for most of it.

More on Pai soon!

2008 already?

Happy New Year to everyone! It's about that time right now in Australia (42 degrees I hear!) and all going to be happening soon in Edinburgh. It is cold and grey and I am not sure about the fate of the street party if the weather continues to go downhill. Having a great time back here but it no longer feels like "home" and that makes me want to come back to Australia even more. Still, though I have one more major leg in my journey which is Thailand. I fly out from London on the evening of the 2nd of January (staying with good friend Claire who I met at VaughanTown) and arrive the next day in Bangkok. Have a few days there then off to Pai in Northern Thailand for a weeks then down to the Andaman Coast. Sometime around the 1st of February I will have to leave and reenter the country as I won't be able to get a Visa due to having no time in London! So I'll be wasting a weekend by flying from Phuket-Singapore or somewhere similar then turning straight around to head back so i can get another 30 day Visa exemption stamp in my passport. Crazy rules, who needs them?

So I wish all the best for everyone in the new year and hope you are all happy and healthy. See you in 2008!

Merry Christmas!

Photo: On top of the Bell Tower in Valencia, Spain.

Although very aware that for most of you, Christmas is already over and you are kicking back on Boxing Day, or hanging out for the Stocktake Sales - right now it is Christmas Day in Madrid!

Staying with Marcos' family, last night we had a supper with 10 members of his family (lots of seafood, and yummy prawns) and today after a lazy morning people are coming back for Christmas lunch, which will probably be in a half an hour (around 4pm!) or so, so I must dash.

I hope you all have a great time over and around Christmas and am thinking of you. Family, friends, all the people I have met over my travels.


Leave me a comment if you still drop in on this page, lately only my everloving Jen seems to be the only one to be replying to my posts (which makes all this effort typing absolutely worth it). It takes no effort at all to click on the comments button below and would give me great joy if you do! I am surrounded by beautiful people here in Madrid but it is still so nice to hear from dear ones around this time of year.

Spain, Part 1

Caught the plane from Rome-Madrid. Everyone on the plan must have been hungry, by the time the food trolley rolled up to 18F there was no food left! They guy next to be in 18E nabbed the last packet of Pringles and offered them to me. Alas, I was stuck with my bottle of water and a rumbling tummy for the next few hours. A few hours later I was in Spain! No Passport control at the airport, so I walked straight through with no stamp in my passport, damn! Followed the directions Diana gave me to her train station, it was really easy and in no time I was with Marcos and Diana in SPAIN! Rest assured there were many exclamations from all of us "Lisa is in SPAIN!" Crazy. Stayed that weekend with Diana and Diana's family (who had visited Edinburgh before, beautiful family). Later that night we went for rationes, like tapas but in bigger portions. Our choices included patates bravas - potato with spicy tomato sauce, calamares - calimari, and orecheo(sp) - pigs ears!!! Now I can say I have tried them but they won't become a regular fixture on my plate...it's a texture thing. The bar we went to had a medieval theme and the tables had real tree stumps as bases. Weird. Also, you can sit at tables with a keg and beer tap all set up so you can pour your own Mahou and help yourself! Apparantly they measure how much you use after you've finished drinking so you can settle the bill.

We head back home after a few drinks and it is cold! There is also a really heavy fog which is baffling - I wasn't expecting this from Madrid at all! Apparantly the change came over that day and was the first day of "cold"...good timing Lisa!

Saturday I was greeted in the morning with Spanish muffins for breakfast - Magdalenas - Marcos loves these even more than Tesco chocolate muffins, which is a lot. Off we go into town and Marcos and Diana give me a grand walking tour of Madrid. Puerto Del Sol, the Heart of Spain (aka kilometre zero), the Royal Palace and Gardens, the Opera House, Gran Via and lots of other places I can't remember right now. The other photo with all the people is in he laneways leading to the Christmas markets, sooooo many people out this Saturday it was unbelievable.

Madrid has real pride of its art collections and I had planned on seeing the Prado or the Reina Sofia but it's a long weekend in Spain and lots of people have come to the capital - the lines for these places are crazy!

We have a yummy lunch, more walking and then time for a coffee stop. By this time, it's 7pm and time for me to head to my Tapas reception for VaughanTown...next post!